Choking The Chickenhawk

by pessimist

King George is having a bad time lately. Not only are the liberals still all over him like Ralph Reed on an unclaimed Indian Casino Dollar, but now the conservatives are turning on him as well - if not for the same reasons:

Conservative intellectuals and commentators who once lauded Bush for what they saw as a willingness to aggressively confront threats and advance U.S. interests said in interviews that they perceive timidity and confusion about longstanding problems including Iran and North Korea, as well as urgent new ones like the latest crisis between Israel and Hezbollah.

Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan administration arms-control official who is close to Vice President Dick Cheney, said he believes that foreign-policy innovation for the White House ended with Bush's second inaugural address, a call to spread democracy throughout the world.

"We have accepted the lawyer-diplomatic fantasy that talking while North Korea builds bombs and missiles and talking while the Iranians build bombs and missiles is progress," Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview.

We were talking about how the conservatives are very disappointed in George's performance. All the promises he made them about easy pickings in Iraq and lucrative opportunities in Afghanistan haven't been realized, and as they say in Texas, "Don't mess with a man's profits!"

"I don't have a friend in the administration, on Capitol Hill, or any part of the conservative foreign-policy establishment who is not beside themselves with fury at the administration," said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has had strong influence in staffing the administration and shaping its ideas.

What are these 'signs of timidity and confusion' that perplex the conservatives?

* Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency.

* They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals it sponsors in Lebanon.

* They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies.

When you got money - or can promise big tax cuts, you got lots of friends. But when the bills come due, and your free-spending ways end, they don't come 'round anymore. No, no-o-o!

Conservatives like to condense every issue down to the most basic economic terms - what did I gain from this? Costs have to be outweighed significantly by profits - and that hasn't yet happened. Thus, the promiser is a failure.

President Bush .... has come under fire from some conservatives — including the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley. Buckley finds himself parting ways with President Bush ... for having strayed from true conservative principles in his foreign policy.

In particular, Buckley views the three-and-a-half-year Iraq War as a failure.

Asked if the Bush administration has been distracted by Iraq, Buckley says "I think it has been engulfed by Iraq, by which I mean no other subject interests anybody other than Iraq... The continued tumult in Iraq has overwhelmed what perspectives one might otherwise have entertained with respect to, well, other parts of the Middle East with respect to Iran in particular."

Asked what President Bush's foreign policy legacy will be to his successor, Buckley says "There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.

"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress," Buckley says. "And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experiencedit would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley says.

Once again, conservative godfather William F. Buckley has come out against President Bush, arguing in an interview with CBS's Thalia Assuras that he isn't really much of a conservative at all.... The American system is different than the European parliamentary ones, of course, but wouldn't it be nice to have Bush held accountable the way parliamentary leaders are?

There's no way he would have been ableto hold on to the confidence of parliamentgiven what he's done(and failed to do)along the way.

Stickings wrote about Buckley's previous criticisms of Bush's conduct as a war leader before:

From Bloomberg: "William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq that is now a failure."

Okay, so let me think this through: Bush's presidency will be judged entirely by what happens in Iraq. Iraq has been a failure. Therefore, Bush's presidency has been a failure. I suppose Buckley is leaving the door open slightly for an outcome somewhere short of failure, but, as of right now, one of the giants of American conservatism is implying that Bush's presidency has been an unqualified failure. The failure is more general than Iraq.

Which is what I and so many othershave been saying all along,and not just because of Iraq.

"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq," Buckley said in an interview that [aired] on Bloomberg Television... The president's "concern has been so completely on the international scope that he can be said to have neglected conservatism" on the fiscal level, Buckley said.

"If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam."

Buckley said ... "it's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure."

The 80-year-old Buckley is among a handful of prominent conservatives who are criticizing the war. Asked who is to blame for what he deems a failure, Buckley said, "the president," adding that "he doesn't hesitate to accept responsibility."

In the interview, Buckley criticized the so-called neo-conservatives who enthusiastically embraced the Iraq invasion and the spreading of American values around the world. "The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country," Buckley said.

Buckley called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a longtime friend, "a failed executor" of the war. And Vice President Dick Cheney "was flatly misled," Buckley said. "He believed the business about the weapons of mass destruction."

Having violated the Eleventh Commandment, will Buckley take a ride with the Swift Boaters?

In recent years, much of the right-wing conservative mainstream has tried to blacklist many of conservatism's leading lights.

Blacklistees' sin was disappointment in George W. Bush,whatever the issue, whatever the strength of their case.

* Andrew Sullivan was labeled a liberal (and subjected to some pathetic homophobic taunts) for decrying what he calls the "Christianist" influence on White House policies and the absurd overspending of the Bush 43 years.

* John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and others were labeled as liberals for decrying the use of wedge issues to demonize gays and stir up fake controversies over issues like flag burning.

* [T]he libertarian Cato Institute, and Reason Foundation, and the many libertarians at the Heritage Foundation... were dismissed as extremists.

Now William F. Buckley, correctly described by CBSnews.com as the "father of modern conservatism," has jumped ship.

We can expect National Review staffers to begin whispering that Buckley is senile at any moment, if they haven't already. Even if he founded National Review. If he's not part of the team, he's the enemy, even if he was the team's original star quarterback and coach.

Buckley isn't the only commie pinko treehugger masquerading as a liberal critic of Owwer Leedur!

The White House seems to have lost interest in its democracy crusade, after free elections advanced the prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas on the West Bank. In Ukraine, the victors of the Orange Revolution have made a mess of things, and the pro-Putin forces are making a comeback

Neither the Afghan war, in its fifth year, nor the Iraq war, in its fourth, goes well. U.S. casualties are not falling, while the death toll among Afghans and Iraqis mounts toward levels where they may have to be described as not simply insurgencies, but civil wars.

America is a spectator in the Palestinian conflict, wringing its hands, but backing Israel as she seeks to starve to death a Hamas that came to power in elections Bush himself sponsored.

What has happened? What has rendered impotent the robust cowboy diplomacy of George W. Bush, a policy of pre-emptive strikes and preventive wars, of crusades for global democracy and ridding the world of tyrants, a policy declared in his "axis-of-evil" address and Second Inaugural?

Answer: Bush has run up against the limits of power.

Americans are discovering you cannot build a democratic nation on Islamic soil in Texas-sized nations like Iraq and Afghanistan without a massive, long-term occupation, [especially] if a slice of the population looks upon the regime you support as a sock puppet of American imperialism.

Why has Bush decided diplomacy is the better part of valor in dealing with Iran and North Korea? Consider the alternative.

Strong as our military may be,it is but one-tenth of the size of the U.S forcesthat conquered Germany and Japan.

U.S. air and missile power, and U.S. special forces guiding warlord armies, can knock over a Taliban regime, with few losses. U.S. armored divisions, backed by unrivaled air and missile power, can roll over an Iraqi army and unhorse an Iraqi regime.

* Pyongyang is a formidable power with a million-man army and 11,000 artillery pieces on the DMZ.

* Iran is three times as populous and four times the size of Iraq.

Should Bush attack either, he could end his term with U.S. forces fighting three major wars.

What is needed is fresh thought on foreign policy now that Cowboy Diplomacy is being abandoned by Bush. We are at what Walter Lippmann called a "plastic moment," when a new foreign policy can be imposed to meet a changed world, and the place to begin is by returning to basics.

As one reviews the ledgers of his foreign policy, Bush seems to have alienated or antagonized just about everyone on earth, with precious little to compensate us for our war losses. And if we are about to jettison his cowboy diplomacy, perhaps it is time to look again at the successful policies Bush and the neocons dismissed and deplore.

For, unlike theirs, these policies never failed America.

What are they? The anti-interventionism of the Founding Fathers from Washington to Wilson, and the conservative policy of containment and deterrence pursued by Eisenhower and Reagan. Both deserve a hearing in the politics of 2008 -- one that neither McCain nor Hillary will give them.

I guess neither will get Pat's vote!

A few days later, Buchanan reinforced his desire to see the US remain out of the mess in Lebanon - no matter what the neo-confidence crowd wants:

My country has been "torn to shreds," said Fouad Siniora, the prime minister of Lebanon, as the death toll among his people passed 300 civilian dead, 1,000 wounded, with half a million homeless.

Israel must pay for the "barbaric destruction," said Siniora.

To the contrary, says columnist Lawrence Kudlow, "Israel is doing the Lord's work."

"Today, we are all Israelis!" brayed Ken Mehlman of the Republican National Committee to a gathering of Christians United for Israel.

On American TV, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says the ruination of Lebanon is Hezbollah's doing. But is it Hezbollah that is using U.S.-built F-16s, with precision-guided bombs, and 155-mm artillery pieces to wreak death and devastation on Lebanon?

No, Israel is doing this, with the blessing and without a peep of protest from President Bush. And we wonder why they hate us.

One wonders if these Christians care about what is happening to our Christian brethren in Lebanon and Gaza, who have had all power cut off by Israeli air strikes, an outlawed form of collective punishment, that has left them with no sanitation, rotting food, impure water and days without light or electricity in the horrible heat of July. One can only imagine what a hell it must be today in Gaza City and Beirut.

But all this carnage and destruction has only piqued the blood lust of the hairy-chested warriors at The Weekly Standard. In a signed editorial, "It's Our War," William Kristol calls for America to play her rightful role in this war by "countering this act of aggression by Iran with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

"Why wait?"

Well, one reason is that the United States has not been attacked.A second is a small thing called the Constitution.

* Where does George W. Bush get the authority to launch a war on Iran?

* When did Congress declare war or authorize a war on Iran?

Answer: It never did.

But these neoconservatives care no more about the Constitutionthan they cared about the truth when they lied into war in Iraq.

"Why wait?"

* How about thinking of the fate of those 25,000 Americans in Lebanon if we launch an unprovoked war on Iran?

* How many would wind up dead or hostages of Hezbollah, if Iran gave the order to retaliate for the slaughter of their citizens by U.S. bombs?

* What would happen to the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, if Shi'ites and Iranian "volunteers" joined forces to exact revenge on our soldiers?

What about America? If Bush bombs Iran, what prevents Hezbollah from launching retaliatory attacks inside the United States?

Richard Armitage, who did four tours in Nam and knows a bit about war, says that, in its ability to attack Western targets, al Qaeda is the B team, Hezbollah the A Team.

None of this is written in defense of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran.

But none of them has attacked our country, nor has Syria, whom Bush I made an ally in the Gulf War, and to whom the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, Ehud Barak, offered 99 percent of the Golan Heights. If Nixon, Bush I and Clinton could deal with Hafez al-Assad, a tougher customer than son Bashar, what is the matter with George W. Bush?

The last superpower is impotent in this warbecause we have allowed Israel to dictateto whom we may and may not talk.

Thus, Bush winds up cussing in frustration in St. Petersburg that somebody should tell the Syrians to stop it. Why not pick up the phone, Mr. President?

What is Kristol's moral and legal ground for a war on Iran? It is the "Iranian act of aggression" against Israel, and that Iran is on the road to nuclear weapons, and we can't have that.

But there is no evidence Iran has any tighter control over Hezbollah than we have over Israel, whose response to the capture of two soldiers had all the spontaneity of the Schlieffen Plan. And, again, Hezbollah attacked Israel, not us. And there is no solid proof Iran is in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which it has signed, but Israel refuses to sign.

If Iran's nuclear program justifies war, why cannot the neocons make that case in the constitutional way, instead of prodding Bush to launch a Pearl Harbor attack? Do they fear they have no credibility left after pushing Bush into this bloody quagmire in Iraq that has cost almost 2,600 dead and 18,000 wounded Americans?

No, Kenny boy, we are not "all Israelis." Some of us still think of ourselves as Americans, first, last, and always.

And, no, Mr. Kristol, this is not "our war." It's your war.

Needless to say [but I will anyway! {blows raspberry}], the Swift Boating began swiftly:

[S]yndicated columnist Pat Buchanan has launched a broadside against what he says are "neo cons" - American conservatives who support Israel and, Buchanan claims, are really pushing for a wider war between the United States and Iran.

Writing in his most recent column "This Is Not Our War", Buchanan bemoaned the violence directed at Lebanon by the Israelis.

Buchanan's column set off a bitter dispute with David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine, provoking a July 21 unsigned editorial "The Protocols of Pat Buchanan," which links Buchanan with the infamous fraudulent document The Protocols of Zion, long used to stir anti-Semitism. Noting that in two of his columns Buchanan accused President Bush "of being a puppet of nefarious Jewish warmongers," the editorial charged that "nothing sets Buchanan’s imagination racing like a Bush-backed Israeli war. On Tuesday, Pat asked, 'Who is whispering in his ear?' His answer: "bloodthirsty Hebrews."

(Note: Buchanan never used this term.)

Pat Buchanan - notably unlike the Democratic Party and its broken down DLC - can dish it out as well as take it:

For his part, Buchanan targeted Weekly Standard editor and Fox News commentator William Kristol, charging that "all this carnage and destruction has only piqued the blood lust of the hairy-chested warriors at the Weekly Standard."

Buchanan may have a lot of detractors, but he does have an ally - sort of:

Out dated and old-fashioned paleoconservative Pat Buchanan asks: "But where are the Christians? Why is Pope Benedict virtually alone among Christian leaders to have spoken out against what is being done to Lebanese Christians and Muslims?"

Buchanan wants to know why American Christians aren't challenging "Israel's rampage against a defenseless Lebanon." Buchanan also wrote that Israel "is imposing deliberate suffering on civilians, collective punishment on innocent people, to force them to do something they are powerless to do: disarm the gunmen among them. Such a policy violates international law and comports neither with our values nor our interests. It is un-American and un-Christian."

How dare Buchanan suggest that provoking wars and imposing deliberate suffering is un-American? That is the old, I-have-a-conscience type of conservatism Buchanan is bleating. He needs to get with the times.

The neo-attitude is that if provoking wars and imposing sufferingis what it takes for me to live the good life,then get 'er done.

Closet classical liberal Buchanan also alleged that "Israel and her paid and pro-bono agents here appear determined to expand the Iraq war into Syria and Iran, and have America fight and finish all of Israel's enemies." He also said that already "Bush is ranting about Syria being behind the Hezbollah capture of the Israeli soldiers . . . Who is whispering in his ear?"

John Hagee and Jerry Falwell are among those brought Dubya to the big dance, so they can speak as loudly as they please in preaching to the president and members of Congress that a war with Iran is necessary in order to get Armageddon rolling so Jesus can come again.

According to writer Sarah Posner, "Hagee has spent the past six months mobilizing popular support for a war with Iran." Hagee argues that America and Israeli should launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran before it can develop any nuclear capability.

By mere convenient coincidence, CUFI is throwing a national hoe-down in Washington. The convention has been scheduled for some time and is believed the first time conservative Christians have come together to lobby Congress to fully support Israel and its middle east policies.

Some thirty five-hundred conservative Christians attended the opening night, Wednesday, July, 19 where they danced and sung [sic] the Star Spangled Banner and Hatikva in Hebrew as they waved American and Israeli flags. CUFI's executive director, David Brog, said: "Christians understand that the threats facing Israel today are the same threats facing America today.

"Israel's enemies are America's enemies"

But it's more than a mere war against western civilization, according to former Israeli General Shimon Erem: "Why support Israel? Well, there are many reasons. There are biblical reasons, etc. But, I think one of the main reasons should be that we are on the side of God -- and God supports Israel."

Has anyone sent a reporter to ask God about this assertion?

But I digress.

Therefore, since God supports Israel,and Jesus can't come until there is war with Israel,then why wait?

As neo-conservative Bill Kristol wrote this week that "we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

It was one of my best strategists who remembered Falwell back in 2003 saying in a piece entitled "Zion's Christian Soldiers" on 60 Minutes that "There are 70 million of us. And if there's one thing that brings us together quickly it's whenever we begin to detect our government becoming a little anti-Israel."

Anybody thinking that Falwell's spirit might have mellowed, he told the FUCI participants that "I will rebuke the State Department for any and every time it told Israel to stand down and show restraint."

Hallelujah, amen, my devoted disciple, I couldn't have preached it any other way. Keep up the good work, my Canis lupus, and don't let those sheep skins itch you too much. You won't have to wear them much longer, now that we are about to achieve our goals.

The Devil forbid a Christian preacher advocate turning the other cheekwhen he could preach ten thousand eyes for every one of our eyes lost.

Yours forever,

Lucifer B. Mephistopheles de Mammon

OK, we'll reel in the tongue from the cheek. A person who claims to be a born-again Christian -and yet is one who opposes King George (APOSTACY!) - gets the last words:

"Every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it."
--Jesus Christ (Mt. 7:26-27)

Spiritually and intellectually, the current administration is built upon sand. The foolish decision to do so may not bring down the White House in a political sense, but it has led to the hurt and ruin, the bloodshed and death, the prostituting and compromising, of an untold number of others. Considering the opportunities given to President Bush by birth, upbringing, conversion, and circumstance, it is nothing less than a tragedy...not only for him, but for us all.

Christianity and conservatism seemed to be natural allies. It's easy to ridicule and condemn Bush Republicans for their "crazy religious fanaticism" if you do not share their theology. [T]hey are likely to dismiss out-of-hand any criticism of Bush coming from someone who is an atheist, agnostic, new ager, or mushy mainstream Protestant. By definition, such critics are spiritually and intellectually untrustworthy.

I don't fall into any of those categories. I am an evangelical: a Bible-believing Christian who accepts the Garden of Eden, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the Fish, Water into Wine, the Empty Tomb, and the Second Coming.

I became a "born-again Christian" in 1978 while in high school. This was several years after becoming a conservative Republican activist. Conversion changed my life dramatically, but, at first, my politics did not seem to be affected.

Imitating the evangelical teachers I listened to at the time, I used the Bible to "prove" divine sanction of conservative policy positions. But it wasn't too long before I began having doubts about changing the world through political means and about the Christianness of conservatism.

I could see that the materialism and militarism of conservatismwere not compatible with pure Christianity.

Ironically, I was getting out of politics about the time Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority were plunging in. In 1984, I was still in my dispensationalist-flavored anarchist mode and I did not vote to reelect Reagan. Soon after, I discovered William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette, the Populist Party, the New Left, and the Green Party. Such moralistic politics were compatible with--although not identical to--my deepest beliefs.

The White House has been under the titular leadership of George W. Bush since January 2001. Bush entered office with a reputation as a Bible-believing Christian, an honest man .... Unfortunately, the political, ethical, and human consequences of this White House have been catastrophic. In some ways, they have been far more harmful than any tsunami or hurricane.

Ironically, most of this harm comes from a faulty spiritual foundation. It is ironic because Bush's spirituality is seen by many of his admirers as his greatest strength. In fact, it is a major weakness. Faulty understanding of Scripture is sometimes worse than no knowledge at all. In the words of Henry Wheeler Shaw, "It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so."

The problem with Bush is not that he is too Christianbut rather not Christian enough.

Used incorrectly, religion can be the last refuge of scoundrels, and even well-meaning zealots have been known to do great harm to their neighbors (not to mention to the reputation of God). The example of the Pharisees comes to mind.

President Bush and his strongest supporters are confident of their own righteousness as they pray on street corners and invoke the name of God amid even the basest political endeavors. It does not stretch the imagination very far to hear them on Judgment Day saying, "Lord, Lord, did we not serve the corporate sector in your name, and wage war in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?"

But self-deluded claims do not make it so and we can assume that these acts have been committed without any divine sanction. Given the spiritual necessity of bearing good fruit and given Christ's opposition to greed and war, it is likely that some of these professing Christians will be told, "I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers" (Mt. 7:15-23).

The Religious Right acts as a handmaiden for Wall Street even though the dominant wing of the GOP has never had any intention of fulfilling the "wish list" of conservative Christians (e.g., school prayer, overturning Roe, federal marriage amendment). It is a case of cynical exploitation and it is facilitated by unprincipled religious leaders.

It is for good reason that Bush is known as a virtual puppet of Wall Street and the Fortune 500. Under Bush, the Republican Party gives social conservatives promises while it gives economic conservatives action.

Deep in his heart, Bush may be a genuine Christian - but if so, he appears to be an immature and worldly Christian hardly worthy of emulation by brothers and sisters in Christ. Bush... is known for his frat-boy smirk, his arrogant swagger, and his ill-tempered inability to admit any mistake or hear any criticism.

George W. Bush has routinely thrown around the word "evil" to describe everything that stands in opposition to his will. By the standards of Jesus Christ's words recorded in the book of Matthew, a case could be made that Bush himself is an evildoer.

It has become increasingly clear that the war in Iraq was built on deceit. Overestimating the threat posed by the Iraqi regime was not a result of "faulty intelligence." Specifically, Bush, Cheney, and others lied about Saddam Hussein's link to al-Qaida and about his ability to destroy American cities with WMDs. As a result of disclosures during the past two years, Bush's reputation for integrity has taken a hit.

Even among those who voted to reelect him,he is widely seen as just another dishonest politician.

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